If you are thinking about starting a home-based Internet business then, having an idea of the type of business you want to start is a great start. Many people start businesses from a love of something. For instance, they may have a passion for birdhouses; they start making birdhouses as a part-time hobby, and later take it a step further by selling them.

In another situation, a person sees an opportunity to start a business from a current occupation. They see an opportunity in the market where they can differentiate themselves by being able to provide a better service or an innovative product. In this situation, a business minded person sees a business opportunity in everything. They are able to take any given situation and turn it into a moneymaking business

The question for you is; which of these situations do you find yourself? The wonderful thing about the Internet is that you can start any business you want. Unlike many businesses that may be handcuffed due to geographical location, language barriers or culture, the Internet has no barriers. For instance, let us say that someone loves skiing and wants to open a ski shop. Where can they open the ski shop, in Florida? Perhaps, but the only customers that will buy from them will be those that are wealthy enough to take ski vacations. It seems more logical that they would be located in a location where there will be large number of skiers. On the Internet they can open the ski shop in Florida and sell to anyone in any location of the world, all you need is the ability to ship product.

This article will explore how to decide which business space you should occupy on the Internet based on the amount of competitors. To start, let us look at the size of some business categories on the Internet.

In Google (November 26, 2005), I typed in the following keywords, Home Business, Herb Gardens, Bike Trails and Classic Books. What did I hope to achieve? By doing this, I was able to see how large each of these business categories are on the Internet.

" Home Business - 2,490,000 000 (2 Trillion)
" Classic Books - 93,000 000 (93 Million)
" Bike Tails - 6,360 000 (6 Million)
" Herb Gardens - 2,290 000 (2 Million)

As you can see the business space for "Home Business" is gigantic, in fact, it is 1,000 times larger than that of "Herb Gardens" the smallest. So what does this mean to you? What this means is that if you are going to start a home business solely on the internet then your competition is going to be extremely stiff as you face off against another trillion or so web pages. Does this mean that you should give up, not at all? On the other side of the coin, in business, many competitors normally indicate an extremely healthy and vibrant market. The only challenge is to be noticed. Besides, the keywords "Home Business" is extremely generic. Nobody will use only these keywords to promote their site. If you had an interest in herb gardens, you could rather use the keywords, "Herb Garden Home Business".

So before you start your home-based business, try playing around with some keywords to discover how many competitors exist in your particular field of interest.